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01 Design orchestration

IMF institutional complexity, AI-native design orchestration.

In a two-week RFP sprint we used an AI-native design workflow to translate dense IMF source material into aligned research artifacts, product specs and coded interface prototypes for three role-specific platforms.

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Source documents

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Week RFP sprint

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Working platforms

AI-native

Design orchestration

Role
Lead UX Designer
Context
EPAM Systems, IMF RFP response
Surface
Voting Portal, Admin Portal, Meeting (BCMS) Portal

The brief arrived as 26 institutional documents and no room for placeholders.

02 Translation

26 documents. 191 nations.
No room for ambiguity.

The challenge was not scale. It was translating institutional rules, voting power, meeting governance, role authority and audit expectations into interfaces that people with real constitutional obligations could trust.

Membership

191member nations, each with a different weight of voice
  • 191 member nations
  • Unequal voting power
  • Different authority levels
  • One trusted platform
  • Governance & complianceRole model, permissions, approval gates
  • Voting rulesVote lifecycle, eligibility, result views
  • Operational processMeeting states, confirmations, calendar logic
  • Technical constraintsFeasible prototype boundaries
  • IMF identity & accessibilityVisual system, WCAG AA, interaction rules

The RFP was not asking for mockups. It required a defensible chain from institutional rule to product behaviour to working prototype.

  1. Day 1

    Brief received

  2. Week 1

    Understanding aligned

  3. Week 2

    Three platforms running

  4. Day 14

    Prototype submitted

03 Operating model

From source documents to
reviewable product decisions.

AI compressed the artifact-generation loop. Human design gates protected interpretation, alignment and institutional correctness. The two tracks ran together, and neither one was allowed to overtake the other.

research.md and prototype documentation.md were not documentation after the fact. They were alignment artifacts that checked whether the team understood the domain before generating specs and interfaces.

The design artifact was not a static Figma file. The design artifact became a living coded interface.

My focus sat at the gates: turning AI-generated artifacts into aligned product decisions before interface generation, not after it.

04 System structure

One institutional system,
three task environments.

Rather than one overloaded platform, the experience was split into three focused environments. Each is shaped by what its users are accountable for, and all three sit on the same rule bedrock.

  • Voting Portal

    Voting Portal, My Votes screen. Resolutions assigned to a governor appear as cards with a countdown, a not-voted status pill and a participation bar.

    Governors · Alternates · Transmitters

    Assigned votes surface as scannable cards. Nothing is buried behind a search.

  • Admin Portal

    Admin Portal dashboard. Four counters for active votes, pending submissions, upcoming deadlines and awaiting certification sit above a prioritised action-items list.

    Secretariat administrators · Staff · OED officers

    Counts and the actions that clear them live in one view, so nobody switches screens to work.

  • Meeting Portal (BCMS)

    Meeting or BCMS portal. A year calendar shows motions as deliberation and voting-window bars across months, with a legend and a detail card for the selected motion.

    Board-calendar and meeting lifecycle participants

    Status pills carry each consultation's state directly on the calendar.

Shared rule bedrock

  • Permissions
  • Audit
  • Identity
  • Accessibility

05 Design system

Rules before decoration.

The visual system had to preserve IMF identity, restraint, accessibility and clarity while stretching a deliberately limited palette into a production interface across three products.

  • 01Identity

    Fund blue, approved typography, protected logo. The institution’s mark was a constraint, not a starting palette.

  • 02Derived palette

    Approved shades and tones extended into hierarchy, surfaces, states and alerts without inventing a new brand.

  • 03Accessibility

    WCAG AA, keyboard operation, visible focus, readable errors. Non-negotiable across all three environments.

  • 04Interaction tone

    Low-noise components, explicit states, restrained motion, audit-friendly flows. Nothing that implies a decision the system has not made.

Motions table in the meeting portal. Each row carries a motion type badge, a status pill, who voted, the vote choice, the result and a deadline, with the nearest deadlines marked in red.
One table, six encoded meanings: motion type, lifecycle status, voting actor, choice, outcome and urgency. Colour never carries a state on its own; every pill also carries a word.

Derived from the approved mark

  • 900

    #001E60

    Identity anchor

  • 700

    #004C97

    Primary action

  • 500

    #2F6FAE

    Secondary marks

  • 100

    #DBE7F5

    Surfaces

  • 50

    #F0F5FB

    Tinted panels

The approved IMF palette alone could not carry a multi-portal interface. We agreed derived shades and tones so the prototype could express hierarchy, states, warnings and accessible contrast without breaking institutional identity.

Design rules were treated as delivery infrastructure, not a finishing layer. They were written before the first screen and enforced in code, which is why three products built in two weeks still read as one system.

A system can look correct and still leave a governor unsure whether a motion actually passed.

06 Governance states

Making governance states
visible.

The hardest design work was not drawing screens. It was turning institutional rules into visible states, available actions and legitimacy cues that a governor could act on without asking anyone what the interface meant.

What needs my vote?

  1. Draft
  2. Pre-Open
  3. Active
  4. Pending Results
  5. Finalised

ActiveSuspended

An active vote can be halted on procedural grounds. Suspension is a first-class state with its own view, not an error, because inside an institution a paused vote is a legitimate outcome that people still have to reason about.

Did the motion legitimately pass?

68.7% for

Voting power, SDR weighted

For
68.7%
Against
11.3%
Abstain
16.1%
Not voted
3.8%

Same vote,
two readings

37.2% for

Country count, one nation one voice

For
37.2%
Against
10.5%
Abstain
11.5%
Not voted
40.8%
Live vote monitoring in the admin portal. Each open vote is a card carrying its state pill, days remaining, and submissions received out of 191 with a progress bar. One card shows a suspended vote.
Show what needs action within three seconds of login. State, time remaining and participation sit on the same card, so triage never requires opening a record.
Certified vote results. Quorum met, 113 of 191 eligible countries voted, 96.16 per cent of voting power participated, with counts for, against, abstained and not voted, then two distribution charts by voting power and by number of countries.
Every result view carries both readings of legitimacy. Publishing only the weighted figure would have been accurate and, for most of the room, misleading.

07 Design review loop

No static handoff.
The running build was the design review.

Across the two weeks I refined interface decisions directly in frontend code and pushed reviewable updates to the Azure monorepo every one to two hours.

Design decisionFrontend code refinementAzure monorepo pushRunning build reviewFeedbackNext iteration1–2 hrREVIEW LOOPSDesign surface: the running build, not a static handoff.

Instead of waiting for a Figma handoff cycle, the team reviewed working interface updates directly in the running build.

This mattered most for BCMS, where scheduling states and calendar behaviour needed repeated validation against real dates rather than against a rendering of one.

The design focus stayed on refining interface decisions in frontend code and pushing reviewable updates, which meant every review argued with something that actually ran.

08 Reflection

AI removed execution friction,
not design judgment.

The prototype proved that AI can accelerate decomposition, specification, prototyping and testing. It also proved that institutional product design still depends on someone deciding what is correct.

Execution accelerated

  • Three working platforms, not three decks
  • A two-week RFP proof of concept
  • Specs, tests, traceability and working routes
  • A coded prototype with real workflow depth

Judgment gates operated here

MANUAL PACEUNCONTROLLED14 DAYSVELOCITY, GOVERNED

Judgment protected

  • Role clarity and trust boundaries
  • State visibility
  • Accessibility
  • Visual-system restraint
  • Human approval gates

AI changed the speed of production, not the need for design judgment.

It shifted the designer’s role toward orchestration, constraint-setting and rapid validation. In a governance system, that shift is not a convenience. It is the only reason velocity was survivable.

IMF Governance Platform · EPAM Systems · Lead UX Designer